Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Occam's Universe:Black Spirals

Black holes have become a commonplace of astronomy, and almost as frequent explanatory entities therein as comets were in an earlier era.

Furthermore, not just black holes but supermassive black holes, with estimated masses several million times that of our sun, have been inferred at the centers of many if not all galaxies, first postulated for our own galaxy by Lynden-Bell and Rees (1971), and bolstered by radio-telescopic studies, most beautifully by Roberts and Goss using the US NRAO Very Large Array radio telescope in 1990-1 (results published in 1993).

It is hypothesized here that such supermassive black holes are themselves at simplest each composed of two black holes orbiting one another at relativistic angular velocities, their masses increased by Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction.

Such "black binary" hypothesis immediately opens the door to systems analogous to those of ordinary multiple stars, a third black hole orbiting the central binary, two black binaries orbiting one another, etc.

Duration of black binary black hole spin-down into one another is obviously important to the hypothesis, and just as obviously depends on angles and velocities of approach. Head-on collisions and the briefest spin-downs would essentially be discrete events. But the relatively small volumes of black hole singularities argue for generally more prolonged spin-downs, even after event horizon coalescences.

Angles of approach and differences of mass and velocity dictate variety of early black binary geometry, dynamics and effects; relative angles of the axes of spin of the black holes involved add variety to middle; and the varying shapes of the coalescing event horizons, from double sphere to conjoined double sphere, spindle, dimpled oblate sphere, oblate and sphere, to late.

Black binaries, especially those whose orbital velocities have become relativistic, would act as sling-shot gravitational accelerators, of photons (which can't go any faster but can be angulated and blue-shifted), particles, dust, rocks, asteroids, planets, and even, in later relativistic and supermassive stages, latecomer stars, neutron stars and black holes, accelerating them out mostly into the orbital plane of the black binary, forming, and continually feeding and imparting radial and angular velocities to, a coplanar nearby astronomical mayhem and cloud and outer wider thinner disk.

Such planar acceleration cloud and disk must distinguish relativistic and near relativistic black binaries from simple black holes, regardless of mass.

Relativistic slingshotting of latecomer neutron stars or black holes with consequent mass and gravitational increases of their own might produce the jets observed protruding from some galaxies.

And particle acceleration by the tightest, fastest and most massive relativistic binaries whose event horizons have not yet coalesced, so that there exists a collider region for accelerated materials from both sides of and at the center of the orbital plane, should produce much higher energy particle collisions and much more exotic particles than anything safely produceable if at all on Earth.

Relativistic black binaries afford a mechanism by which an elliptical galaxy might be transformed into a disk-and-plane if not spiral galaxy, by two black holes spinning down into each other, with the rest of the elliptical feeding and being influenced by the growing mass of and gravitation and angular and radial accelerations exerted by the black binary, which might well not form at the center of that galaxy, although since ellipticals are densest there that would seem to be the greatest probability.

Such scenario does not explain the emergence of spiral arms, although planar inflow and outflow currents in late disk-and-plane might account for some, and jetting might account for others, including the very wide elliptical-to-spherical "ring" arms noticeable in some.

Some spiral barring might be accounted for a new acceleration disk forming angled to the original; other by jetting, and still other by latecomer black binary orbit of a core black binary.

And two black binaries forming two spirals from an elliptical galaxy would present two small spirals almost or actually conjoined or intermingled.

Finally, black binary terminal spin-down and consumption of a galaxy might account for quasars, the gravity involved reddening the image and giving a false impression of distance.

If black binaries exist, and they do not seem to be impossible, one would expect if not their component black holes themselves then their effects to be observable. Black binary invocation seems to illuminate some problems of galactic astronomy. And, indeed, as explanatory entities, black binaries intrinsically afford a great variety of galactic phenomena and evolutions and morphologies, seemingly largely corresponding to that observable.

Still, at least one spiral galactic morphology seems inconsistent with such hypothesis, some barred spirals apparently having spiral arms attached to the edges or ends of and running at right angles to the planes of the bars if any.

[After I brooded over this for months, and actively worked on it for weeks, I decided to check the Web to see if anyone else had been working on it, and, well, for example:

But existing theory seems to be that the supermassive black holes with which it is concerned are themselves simple black holes.

Nonetheless, the study of such with regard to their roles in "active galactic nuclei" is very pertinent to the present hypothesis, which is concerned mostly with black binary role in ordinary galactic evolution and morphology.